Personally, I'm headcanoning that Time Drift can happen in reverse - if you're stuck in one period, you start to blend into the timestream, like Ray/Kendra/Sara in the 50's. But if you're timeless for too long, you start to lose your sense of self. It might explain the Time Masters being an unnaturally amoral group, in a way, and also might explain stuff like why Jerk-but-for-Reasons S1!Martin was Jerk-for-no-reasons S2!Martin. They're disconnected from their own reality and its eroding them.
I’ve been waiting to answer this ask until I had something more cogent to say than just like *pterodactyl screeching* but it’s not coming to me lol.
I love this headcanon. I’m 100% sure the Legends writers aren’t aiming for that, but it fits and it’s beautiful (and tragic, so tragic?). You can see it for all of them. Like, acknowledging that all of these changes can come from other places, I love to just imagine how Time Drift could’ve catalyzed or exacerbated all of these things:
How Sara’s characterization has changed from Arrow to S1 to now. Being captain but also being across time so much, taking pieces of the different eras with her, changing her worldview as time flows around her. She’s a nurse, she’s a witch, she’s Sir Lancelot. She doesn’t think about if she’s leaving pieces of herself behind with each new one she picks up in a new time. She knows she’s different, but can’t quite remember in what way, anymore.
Rip for sure, but he’s known in the longest, felt it the longest, and understands it the deepest. And how having a team changed that for him, how having a family is probably what kept him tethered in time in the first place, more than the average Time Master. Losing himself in memories when he enters the temporal zone, lost whenever he’s not with other people.
Martin becoming more of a jerk, talking (thinking?) less and less about Clarissa, less about being a hero on an adventure. Distancing himself from Jax and performing brain surgery on Rory before turning around and being an ass to them both not long after, sort of forgetting all that. What happens in one time seems to stay in that time, for him.
Jax becoming harder. Less focused on what it means to be part of a team, seeming happier when they’re on a mission and he’s on the ground, re-anchored in a time period. He shines when he’s on mission, feels alive no matter what time they’re in. The in-between days are spent focusing on the ship, learning all of the Waverider’s idiosyncracies and nooks and crannies. He loses himself for hours and hours, the passage of time and the sense of isolation not really mattering.
Ray never having full left the 50′s behind, still nostalgic for that life and holding part of it dear. Clinging to the Atom suit more than ever because he’s trying to suppress what it was like to have a life without it for a while, what it was like to be happily engaged and in love without all this. Welcoming the Time Drift on the ship and forgetting about it all, drifting away from the memories until he sees Nate and Amaya, until he’s back with Gertie (Gertrude? T-rex anyway) and remembers what it means to feel tethered and holding on to that.
Mick emotionally drifting away, drinking on the ship, eating on the ground in a time period. He’s resisting the sensation, like tendrils at the back of his mind, of what it felt like to be Kronos, never tethered in time at all, always afloat. He hates the feeling, and tries to drown it along with the rest of his sorrows. It takes connecting to the team, helping them, to remind him you can be tethered to a person, to people, and not to a time.
Leonard becoming untethered from his own past the longer he spent on the Waverider. More enmeshed in his goals, and then in the mission. In changing. Time Drift felt like flux to him, an impetus, a catalyst. Things felt different and he blamed it on not being in Central, not having the mafia and the cops chasing after him and breathing down his neck. But if he trusted himself to dig deeper, he’d have felt the fuzzy edges surrounding that sensation, the pull of the temporal zone putting distance between himself now and himself then. Time doesn’t flow at the Vanishing Point, and his past was so far away when he stepped up to the Oculus to die. Time didn’t feel real, and he cut the strings tethering him to it.
And the newcomers now, Nate and Amaya. Who had lives and families and teams before leaving. Who feel like those people are so distant, somehow, and think of them less and less, even though it’s been just a few months. How the present starts to feel like the only thing that matters: the mission. Amaya knows the feeling from the JSA but it’s different here, now. And Nate’s never known it at all. The jolt of excitement at being on the ground in a new time, the feeling that he’s more alive, somehow. He can’t place his finger on it. Neither of them can. Not yet. But Amaya feels like she can’t go back, not know. Her past life is just so... distant. Like it’s less real, somehow. It calls to her, sometimes, shows up unexpectedly in the form of an old teammate in a surprising era. But there is a wrongness to it, now.
It’s hard to go back for any of them. The Hawks were different. They had lived 207 lives, with memories from each. Carter from the future even more so, but he retained no memories of the lives not lived with his beloved. They have always existed across time, and always felt the memory and sway of those past years, of different selves. Time Drift barely touched them, flowing over them like a gentle breeze they almost laughed at. Being in a different era was like a trip down memory lane, ultimately frustrating if they stayed too long. It’s why they were keen to stay in 2016, to forget life in the present, in one time. They’ve always preferred the present.